The invention relates to methods for processing information, wherein first information is to be sent or has been received by using a first group of sub-bands of a frequency band and second information is to be sent or has been received by using a second group of sub-bands, which differs from the first group, of the frequency band.
In radio communication systems, messages, for example with voice information, image information, video information, SMS (short message service), MMS (multimedia messaging service) or other data, are transmitted between sending and receiving station via a radio interface with the aid of electromagnetic waves. In this context, the stations, depending on the actual design of the radio communication system, can be different types of subscriber stations or network-side radio stations such as repeaters, radio access points or base stations. In a mobile radio communication system, at least some of the subscriber stations are mobile radio stations. The electromagnetic waves are radiated by carrier frequencies which are in the frequency band provided for the respective system.
Current mobile radio communication systems are often arranged as cellular systems, e.g. in accordance with the GSM (global system for mobile communication) or UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system) standard, with a network infrastructure including e.g. base stations, facilities for supervising and controlling the base stations and further network-side facilities. A further example is represented by broadband networks with wireless access, for example according to IEEE 802.16. Future mobile radio communication systems can be e.g. developments of UMTS, called LTE (long-term evolution), or fourth-generation systems and ad-hoc networks. Apart from cellular, hierarchical radio networks organized over a wide space (supralocal), there are wireless local area networks (WLANs) with a radio coverage area which, as a rule, is much more limited in space. Examples of different standards for WLANs are HiperLAN, DECT, IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth and WATM.
The access of subscriber stations to the common transmission medium is controlled by multiple access methods/multiplexing methods (MA) in radio communication systems. In these multiple accesses, the transmission medium can be divided between the subscriber stations in the time domain (time division multiple access, TDMA), in the frequency domain (frequency division multiple access, FDMA), in the code domain (code division multiple access, CDMA) or in the space domain (space division multiple access, SDMA). Combinations of multiple access methods are also possible, such as, e.g. the combination of a frequency division multiple access method with a code division multiple access method.
To achieve the most efficient transmission of data possible, the entire available frequency band can be split into several sub-bands or frequency subcarriers (multicarrier methods). The basic concept of the multicarrier systems is to change the initial problem of transmitting a broadband signal into the transmission of several narrow-band signals. Among other things, this has the advantage that the complexity required at the receiver can be reduced. Furthermore, dividing the available bandwidth into several narrow-band sub-bands provides for distinctly greater granularity of the data transmission with regard to the distribution of the data to be transmitted to the different sub-bands, i.e. the radio resources can be distributed with great fineness to the data to be transmitted or to the subscriber stations, respectively. The available bandwidth can be utilized efficiently by assigning a plurality of sub-bands to different subscriber stations especially in the case of transmissions with variable data rate or in the case of burst-like data traffic. One example of a multicarrier transmission method is OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) in which pulse shapes which are approximately rectangular in time are used for the sub-bands. The frequency spacing of the sub-bands is selected in such a manner that in the frequency space, at the frequency at which the signal of a sub-band is evaluated, the signals of the other sub-bands have a zero transition. The sub-bands are thus orthogonal to one another.